Labor Woes Present Void For Tv Nation

Ed Moore

October 06, 1994|By ED MOORE Daily Press

Do you miss baseball? If you don't, you may be an American, bu you don't understand America.

The National League and American League baseball playoff series, wild cards and all, were scheduled for this week, the NL beginning Tuesday and the AL beginning Wednesday. But baseball went AWOL, cruelly taking our hearts along for the desertion.

Like a mindless lemming, the National Hockey League then went along for the plunge into the abyss. Riding a wave of popularity unprecedented in its history, the NHL was set to open a season in which even its players were now considered modern rock-n-roll athletes. The league once known for its toothless goons with unpronounceable names and undocumented brains, now has the likes of Russian Pavel Bure stealing the hearts of teen-age girls, hearts once reserved for the likes of Joe Namath.

What, in the name of Bobby Sherman, was hockey thinking when it let that kind of love slip away?

If you are not a competition freak, you probably don't understand the significance of these voluntary immigrations from the arena to the unemployment line. But the truth is, sports in America became popular because competition addicts just can't get enough.

For whatever reason, America is the most sports-crazy culture in the world, and we revel in our games. Historians think it's because we are historically a warrior nation. Discretionary income and leisure time were probably greater factors. After all, Atilla the Hun never used his sword to foil a fastball, and Alexander the Great never sat still long enough to diagram the power sweep.

If it moves and someone's keeping score, we'll watch it.

John Madden is the most popular announcer in sports specifically because he revels in the glory of competition. Unlike those high-brow analysts who try to explain the power sweep in terms usually reserved for the Battle of Waterloo, Madden tells us what we all instinctively know. The power sweep is beautiful because it feels so darn good just to hit somebody as hard as you can. The people who started ESPN, of course, knew there were millions of sweat junkies who love that sort of thing.

For generations, the baseball playoffs have galvanized the nation. Now we take our sports where we can get them.

ESPN began innocently enough by giving us foreign trash sports refereed by people in yellow raincoats. So many of us even watched sports from Down Under that Major League Baseball, the NHL, the College Football Association and the National Football League all decided it would be worth a lot of money to move to ESPN.

But now that two of those groups are standing in unemployment lines, ESPN is essentially back where it started. Sunday night, the network that brought us the NHL finals as recently as early summer, was scheduled to give us the final day of baseball's regular season and the second day of the hockey season. Instead, the network gave us aerobics.

ESPN replaced baseball and hockey by anything programmers could dig out of the dusty vault. Atlanta Braves Greg Maddux and Dave Justice were replaced by an ancient rerun of the National High School Cheerleading Championships. In prime time. Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky were followed by an almost 3-year old rerun of something called the Ms. Fitness America competition, which claims to be a sport that combines bodybuilding and aerobics. Tina Turner already did it better, so why bother?

And we're stuck with trash sports for awhile longer. The NBA doesn't start until Nov. 4. The nation's psyche might have imploded by then.

ESPN has me shackled, and my psyche is imploding already. I even know who won the cheerleading competition.